Asus Eees to get voice-control in 2009

Though software engineers have worked towards voice control of PCs for decades now, it’s still very much a lackluster solution for day-to-day computer use. There’s many reasons for this: the technical challenges of recognizing a string of phonemes mumbled into a microphone from a wide range of accents and speaking styles is large, but with some self-training, these can be overcome, and voice-control is used by thousands of handicapped people every day to check their email and surf the net.

{ad}But while many of us would theoretically like to issue stern voice commands to our computers — Jean Luc Picard’s “Earl Grey. Hot.” is the Holy Grail of sci-fi computer voice recognition — the bottom line is that for most users, it is vastly less efficient than smashing commands with your digits into a keyboard or waggling a mouse around.

So Asus’ plans to include voice command in their Eee PC netbooks and nettops at first arches a skeptical eyebrow. According to Asus CEO Jerry Shen, voice-controlled computing will be coming to their Eee line by the end of 2009, and they have dedicated an internal team to working with third-parties to conquer the problem.

At first, a voice-controlled netbook seems like a rather useless feature to cram into an Eee PC in an attempt to differentiate Asus’ offerings from a doppelganger crowd of competitor products. But there is one interesting possibility here: the Eee PCs all make excellent kitchen computers, and asking your computer to look up a recipe for you or convert cups to milliliters while your hands are dripping with dough is about as close to “Earl Grey. Hot.” as we’re likely to get in the foreseeable future.